Re: [MiNT] Gentoo Installer? (PLEASE: NO DAYDREAMING IN THIS THREAD PLEASE!)

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk>]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 22:14 +0100, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:
> Kåre Andersen wrote:
> 
> > There is no need to install all of easymint. You need mke2fs, tar and
> > gzip. A mint kernel and a shell (i suggest conholio) is also useful...
> > Thats about it.
> > Boot to shell or aes, mke2fs on the partition you want to use. tar
> > zxvf Alans tarball. Voila.
> > 
> > An installer would be awesome tho :)
> 
> Sounds like there's a need for two installers.
> 
> 1. A general FreeMiNT installer that installs/updates the kernel, XaAES
> and the basic tools (like TosWin2 and the fs tools). This is totally
> independent of Gentoo, SpareMiNT or any other distribution, it just
> installs and configures a working MiNT/AES setup.

Now that's a good idea, and I like it.

> 2. The next step which is the Gentoo installer. I haven't tested Gentoo
> yet, but from the descriptions all this installer has to do is to
> initialize an ext2 partition and unpack the tarball. From then on the
> maintenance of the Gentoo is system is taken care of with the Gentoo
> package manager, right?

Right.

> I have an installer as described in (1). I wrote it in 2000 for a MiNT
> "distribution" I called NewbieMiNT. Unfortunately this installer was
> never properly finished as I messed up my gcc install and lost
> motivation. Also, it depended heavily on a closed source GEM library so
> the code isn't suitable for release. Some screenshots of the installer
> can be seen here:
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20000527055027/http://atari.nvg.org/
> 
> I think that such an installer would be a good addition to the FreeMiNT
> project, and with this in mind I started to rewrite this installer a
> couple of months ago. Unfortunately I've had a lot less spare time than
> expected, so progress is very slow.

Indeed it would.

Alan.